Michael Bowman

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

This is very worth reading because it beautifully lays out the faulty thinking that has given us suicidal economic policy that has also made no impact on climate change whatsoever.

Characteristically, it pretends that those who oppose Net Zero do so because they deny that the climate is changing (no one sensible does), that outsourcing our emissions to poor countries, an accounting trick, is somehow green (it's not) and, most importantly, challenges the argument that the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions produced in the world today are emitted by countries that care about economic growth way more than they care about "saving the planet" (China, India etc) by citing Kenya whose entire annual emissions are roughly equivalent to what China emits in about 8 hours.

The hoax is not climate change. The hoax is that we can stop it by making ourselves poorer.

[The War on Beauty @thewaronbeauty]

The past is becoming a foreign language

[Bowman Capital Management @BowmanCapital]

Macro thesis pages 1-4. View pages 5-8 in comment section below: $SPY $GLD $TLT $XLK $USDJPY $EURUSD #NWO #MAGA #TrumpTariff

[Spencer A. Klavan @SpencerKlavan]

If present trends continue, they mark not the end of reading but the end of mass literacy, turning books back into what they used to be: the special super-weapon of a minority class whose mental powers, I propose, will outstrip those of the average mind as greatly and meaningfully in the post-literate era as in the pre-literate era.

That would mean the age of high tech looks like the Middle Ages in this regard. Or at least that it looks the way we picture the Middle Ages, with a priestly caste wielding superior powers of focus, prediction, observation, and manipulation over a mentally reduced general public. Once again the readers would be as gods among men.

I’m not convinced that’s inevitable, but whether it is or not, the best gift you can possibly give your kids right now is to steel them against the cognitive meltdown that’s coming by shielding them against the phone barrage and teaching them what they can gain from attending in sustained love to great books. The case for a liberal arts education has never been easier to make.

[KG @interstatejuche]

Chattanooga's new courthouse. The style is called "Greco-Deco". We're taking this worldwide. We're taking this to Mars. This is the answer.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Hier un ami m'a dit: "le UK, c'est fini."

On me dit souvent la même chose de la France. "La France, c'est fini."

Je comprends d'où vient ce sentiment. Les chiffres de l'immigration, la dette, les rues de Londres et de Paris, les institutions capturées. Le constat est largement exact.

Mais la conclusion est une erreur. Et pas une petite erreur d'analyse. Une erreur mortifère.

Voici pourquoi.

Dire "le UK c'est fini" ou "la France c'est fini", ce n'est pas un diagnostic local. C'est une capitulation globale que vous n'avez pas encore avouée. Parce que le UK et la France ne sont pas des pays comme les autres. Ce sont deux des trois matrices de l'Occident. La common law, l'habeas corpus, le Parlement de Westminster. Les Lumières, les droits de l'homme, le Code civil. Si ces deux-là tombent définitivement, vous ne perdez pas deux pays. Vous perdez la preuve que le modèle fonctionne.

Et le mécanisme est implacable: si le wokisme, qui n'est que le communisme après sa mutation des années 70, gagne en Europe, il ne s'arrête pas en Europe. Une idéologie qui a survécu à la chute de son propre empire ne s'arrête pas à une frontière. Elle a déjà traversé l'Atlantique une fois, en 1966, par Johns Hopkins. Elle retraversera dans l'autre sens. L'Occident tient ensemble ou tombe ensemble.

Regardez la carte de ce qui est en jeu. Les États-Unis, le Canada, le Royaume-Uni, l'Irlande. La France, l'Allemagne, l'Italie, l'Espagne, le Portugal, le Benelux, la Suisse, l'Autriche. Les pays nordiques. La Pologne, les Baltes, la Tchéquie, toute cette Europe centrale qui a déjà payé pour savoir. Et les avant-postes: l'Australie, la Nouvelle-Zélande, le Japon, la Corée du Sud, Taïwan, Israël. Ce n'est pas une liste de pays. C'est une seule civilisation distribuée sur quatre continents. Abandonner un nœud, c'est affaiblir tout le réseau.

Maintenant, le point que tout le monde oublie quand il désespère.

Les plus grands d'entre nous ont désespéré aussi.

Peter Thiel a raconté la scène dans son interview au New York Times. Un dîner avec Elon, pendant la campagne de 2024. Thiel lui dit: si Trump perd, je quitte le pays. Et Elon répond: "There's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to go." Il n'y a nulle part où aller. Thiel rentre chez lui et comprend deux heures plus tard ce qu'il vient d'entendre: Elon ne croyait plus en Mars. Plus comme projet politique. Parce qu'il avait compris que le gouvernement socialiste et l'IA woke le suivraient jusque sur Mars.

L'homme qui construit des fusées pour fuir la Terre avait conclu que la fuite était impossible.

Et qu'a-t-il fait de ce désespoir? Il n'a pas émigré. Il n'a pas abdiqué. Il a compris que puisqu'il n'y a nulle part où fuir, il n'y a qu'une option: se retourner et combattre. Ici. Maintenant.

C'est exactement le bon raisonnement, et il vaut pour le UK et pour la France: il n'y a pas de sortie, donc il n'y a que la reconquête.

Et la reconquête a déjà commencé. Ouvrez les yeux sur ce qui s'est passé en trois ans.

L'idéologie qui semblait invincible en 2020 est en train de crever de partout. Les programmes DEI démantelés les uns après les autres dans les plus grandes entreprises américaines. Les universités forcées de rendre des comptes pour la première fois en cinquante ans. La censure qui régnait sur les réseaux, brisée. Les électorats occidentaux qui, élection après élection, rejettent le logiciel. Ce qui se vendait comme le sens de l'Histoire se révèle pour ce que c'était: une mode portée par la peur, et la peur a changé de camp.

Et au centre de ce retournement, un fait sans précédent: l'homme le plus riche de l'histoire de l'humanité, en route pour devenir le premier trillionaire, a décidé de consacrer sa fortune, ses plateformes et ses machines à détruire cette idéologie. Pas à s'en accommoder. Pas à acheter la paix. À la détruire. Jamais, dans toute l'histoire de la guerre froide, le monde libre n'a eu un atout pareil. Les dissidents soviétiques écrivaient des samizdats à la machine à écrire. Nous, nous avons les fusées, les modèles d'IA et le réseau de distribution mondial de l'information entre les mains de gens qui ont choisi notre camp.

Alors non, le UK n'est pas fini. La France n'est pas finie. Une nation n'est finie que le jour où ses bâtisseurs le décrètent, et le décréter, c'est précisément le but de guerre de l'adversaire. Le déclinisme n'est pas de la lucidité. C'est l'idéologie ennemie qui tourne dans votre propre tête, qui vous fait faire son travail gratuitement.

Il n'y a jamais eu autant d'espoir pour le monde libre. Le vrai. Pas le mirage de 1989, quand nous avons célébré la victoire sur une adresse vide. Cette fois, nous savons où est l'ennemi, nous savons comment il fonctionne, et les hommes les plus capables de la planète sont enfin entrés dans la bataille.

Le pessimisme est un luxe de spectateur. Nous ne sommes pas des spectateurs.

Au travail.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

this is a simple, elegant and very effective idea. take the taxes of the bottom 50% to zero.

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

Here's my advice to single American men who feel hopeless about ever finding a good woman to marry:

Take a month or two between jobs and drive across the USA. Stop at every gas station and truck stop, and eat every meal at diners during non-rush hours. Avoid cities; stop primarily in poor rural areas out in the middle of nowhere.

Every time you see a pretty cashier or waitress with a good vibe, politely ask her out. Tell her you're out seeing the country and looking for a place to settle and a good woman to marry. Repeat until you've found someone to go steady with.

This worked for at least one young, awkward guy I knew at a Catholic Church in Louisiana. Met his wife at Love's on I-80 in Iowa. She converted, moved to Louisiana with him, and they go back to Iowa together every Christmas, fueling up at the truck stop where they met. She was giddy to find him, as most of the men in her town were either already married or total losers. They were both in their early 30's when they met.

I had planned on doing this when I got out of the military, but Providence had it that I'd never have to try it out -- I'd be engaged to Keturah just before my discharge. But I say to any young man having trouble finding a woman it's absolutely worth a try.

At worst, you see the country and go on a few bad dates. At best, you find the love of your life.

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

🔥NEW: Clarence Thomas — full remarks on progressivism, its foundations, history, and impact from his appearance at University of Texas at Austin:

“Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao were all intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration is based.”

"Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people."

"It comes as no surprise that the progressives embraced eugenics... It was only a small step for Wilson to resegregate the federal workforce."

"It was only another step for the government to launch sterilization programs on those deemed by the experts of the day to be unfit to reproduce."

“European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world, with its weakened, decentralized government and strong individual rights. They say our 18th-century Declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government."

"But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bonds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Fascism, which after all was national socialism, triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions."

"The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill tens of millions more of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to higher-good notions of history or progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the visions of the anointed."

"None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the Declaration. Tocqueville's Democracy in America is largely about how America owed its superiority over Europe to its conscious decision to reject central planning and administrative rule, root and branch."

"Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive.”

[nic carter @nic_carter]

it hasn't sunk in for most people. we already live in a post-scarcity society. UBI is already here.

basic package: disability, medicaid, food stamps etc

bonus package: literally getting paid for staying at home and hanging out with your relatives

extra bonus: if you are willing to commit fraud, pretend your kids are autistic and get paid for that. get paid for watching your neighbor's kid. pretend you are taking care of your grandma. fake hospice clinic. fake rehab clinic. fake therapy clinic.

giga bonus: during a time of crisis take advantage of PPP or CARES and open a fake business and get paid for existing

people are shocked when they learn that defense is the FIFTH largest line item in the budget. ahead of defense: social security ($1.6T), interest on debt ($1.1T) medicare ($1T), medicaid + ACA ($1T), AND THEN defense ($0.9T)

complain about defense all you like, but healthcare fraud is a way bigger factor. hundreds of billions per year.

this is only going to get worse, because the fraud is a structural part of the system – payouts to client groups in exchange for votes (normally D).

in the US, only 47% of the population actually works (fully 14% of the population is working age and does not work). retirees are 18% and children 22%.

the system I described above subsidizes 50m non-working people absolute minimum, but really it's far more because people that are paid to stay home and take care of their relatives are considered "workers"

of that 47% of "actual workers" maybe one third does real work, the rest are shuffling papers around or doing fake email jobs. so you have, rough math, 50 million actual workers supporting 300 million dependents. that's the nature of the economy today. it will only accelerate. eventually you will have 10 million using AI tools to do all the work and 340 million dependents.

the reason no one roots out the fraud is because it's the system that keeps our extremely fragile polity intact. the fraud is the UBI. the purpose of the system is what it does.

of course, it's a deeply unfair system, because you are allowed to commit fraud if you are a politically protected client group of the democrats. DOGE was killed faster than any government program ever, because it attempted to root out the fraud. if you are honest and unwilling to commit fraud, you are a huge loser in this system. your neighbor will have their mortgage subsidized by some government program. they will get favorable SBA loans due to DEI. they will open a fake hospice or autism clinic. they will get paid for taking care of their neighbor's kid and vice versa. the primary skill in the labor market is learning how to extract money from state and federal government programs, not gaining skills or making yourself employable. if you are just trying to work an ordinary wagie job you are a huge sucker. you are paying 40-50% effective all in taxes to everyone else who is a net taker.

the sad part is because AI is such a substantial productivity boost, it will actually keep this system going for a while longer, and maybe in perpetuity. AI boosts the 15% of the population that is actually productive so much that the remaining 85% can coast by. no one in charge will change this because they can't think of anything else. the political costs of a real UBI program are too great and we don't have the money for it anyway. so we will keep this covert fraud-based UBI program running indefinitely. unfortunately, if you are an honest wagie, you lose.

[Stephen Franks @franks_lawyer]

Of course they will. No democratic government could survive allowing its own people and economy to collapse into the cold and dark of an energy-less spring while it kept exporting the fuel that might save it.
It would be painted internally as the modern equivalent of the Irish wheat exports during the potato famine.

And Korea can’t supply us anyway if its refineries aren’t getting feedstock.
What on earth has been in the heads of our ‘leaders’ pretending we’ve got ‘reserves’ that consist of contracts with suppliers.

We were stupid to allow closure of our refinery, and even more stupid to stop exploring and accessing our own oil and gas, but to do that then not build up real emergency stocks takes the cake.

[New Zealand Taxpayers' Union @TaxpayersUnion]

Extraordinary powers. Tens of billions spent.
Accountability isn’t too much to ask. 👀💰

[Voice of Rabbis @voiceofrabbis]

This was the full text of my statement to the Committee on Religious Liberty. I was told there were no more slots open on any panel, so I could not testify. Instead, I was told I could send in a written statement for the Committee to read. The main point was captured in the statement that @CarriePrejean1 read at the hearing, and her question to the Committee, "Is this anti-Semitic?" went unanswered.

January 30, ‘26

Dear Members of the Religious Liberty Commission,

I am writing at the request of Mary Margaret Bush, Director and Designated Federal Official of the U.S. Department of Justice Religious Liberty Commission, to address an issue increasingly central to contemporary antisemitism and to the civic standing of Jewish Americans: the perception that Jews are less fully American because they are viewed as nationally connected to the State of Israel.

The observations offered here are descriptive, not polemical. They identify a recurring pattern visible across countries, political contexts, and levels of extremism. Jews are uniquely held accountable for the actions of a foreign state due to an ideology—Zionism—that defines Israel as the state of the Jewish people everywhere. This framing reclassifies Jews not primarily as citizens of their countries of residence, but as members of a transnational collective centered in Israel. The result is a shift in how Jews are perceived, discussed, and treated.

A central difficulty in confronting this form of antisemitism is that two opposing camps—Zionists and antisemites—often proceed from the same foundational premise, despite reaching opposite moral conclusions. Both regard Jews foremost as part of a global national entity whose political center is Israel. Antisemites invoke this premise to justify suspicion, exclusion, and collective blame; Zionists invoke it to affirm representation and shared identity. In both frameworks, Jews are positioned as inherently foreign.

This convergence is structural rather than rhetorical. Antisemitic narratives routinely depict Jews as a unified political force acting on behalf of Israel, while official Zionist doctrine presents Israel explicitly as the nation-state of Jews worldwide. Israeli leaders have articulated this plainly. In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the Nation-State Basic Law by stating, “Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people—and them alone.” The law itself is titled Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has similarly explained Jewish statehood through analogies such as: “Israel is to the Jewish people what France is to the French people, Ireland is to the Irish, and Japan is to the Japanese.” Such formulations recast Jewish identity as a national one analogous to citizenship-based identities in other countries, thereby converting Israel’s actions into actions perceived as taken in the name of Jews everywhere.

The consequences of this framing are significant. Unlike Judaism, which is a religion, Frenchness or Japaneseness is tied to citizenship in a sovereign state. In the American context, American Jews are actually American citizens who practice Judaism. Reframing Jewish identity as national rather than religious places Jews outside Israel in the position of a foreign national group residing abroad. No other religious group faces this condition. No state claims to represent Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists globally as a political collective. American Catholics are not expected to answer for Vatican policies; American Muslims are not held responsible for Saudi or Iranian actions. Only Jews are routinely implicated in a foreign government’s decisions because only their identity is ideologically defined in this way—falsely—by Zionist doctrine.

This perception predictably leads to collective attribution. Anger directed at Israel becomes redirected toward Jews. Data from the Tel Aviv University Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry shows that antisemitic incidents surge during Israel-related conflicts and remain elevated thereafter. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 9,354 cases—the highest number in 46 years—with 58 percent containing elements related to Israel or Zionism. No such patterns appear for other religious or ethnic groups tied to ancestral territories during periods of international conflict.

Jewish communities outside the United States have confronted this dynamic directly. Following Israeli military actions in Gaza, prominent Jewish figures in Turkey issued a public letter stating that Turkish Jews bear no responsibility for Israel’s policies and should not be expected to answer for them. They described the attribution of collective responsibility to Jews as racism and emphasized that no citizen should be required to account for the conduct of a foreign state—an expectation that had, in practice, become commonplace.

This pattern echoes older historical structures. In much of European history, Jews were treated as guests, protected minorities, or resident aliens, even after generations of residence. Their status rested on conditional toleration rather than inherent belonging. Emancipation extended rights, but the perception of alienness persisted, allowing exclusion or expulsion when political or social conditions shifted. Framing Jews today as nationally tied to Israel rehashes this older model in modern terms: Jews may be equal guests, perhaps even protected guests, but not unquestioned members of the civic body.

Addressing this form of antisemitism requires more than law enforcement or civil rights protections. It also calls for civic and educational clarity. American civics education should explicitly teach that equal rights arise not from tolerance of difference, but from shared citizenship. The United States rejects conditional belonging and denies the category of “foreign ethnicity” among its citizens. Civics curricula—potentially supported through DOJ educational initiatives or partnerships—should clarify that American Jews are Americans as such, not Americans despite or alongside another national identity. Such education should also affirm that no citizen owes explanation, defense, or opposition to the policies of a state in which they hold no citizenship.

Legal equality exists, but rights alone are insufficient. Rights can be extended to guests or residents. Civic belonging is unconditional. When Jews are framed as part of a foreign national collective, they may retain protections while losing the presumption of full belonging.

The American tradition rejects this framework. In his 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, George Washington refused the language of tolerance, writing that the United States ��gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Jews were not guests in America; they were Americans. Emma Lazarus’s words at the base of the Statue of Liberty affirm the same principle: the nation is constituted by civic inclusion, not ancestry or creed.

Viewing Jews as less American because of a perceived tie to Israel contradicts these foundational principles. It revives a concept of conditional belonging that American civic identity was designed to eliminate.

Distinguishing and disentangling the State of Israel from Jews as citizens of other countries is therefore essential—not only to combating contemporary antisemitism, but to safeguarding the inclusive character of American religious liberty itself.

Respectfully,

Yaakov Shapiro

Quote @yaakov_shapiro
Source @authenttorahjew @TorahJudaism

[Satire Squad HQ @SatireSquadHQ]

“As I’m sure you know Canadians feel rather bruised and insulted by Donald Trump”

The Truth about Donald Trump, Mark Carneys win and American History.

[Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya]

I think this thread is posted in at least a simulacrum of good faith, so I'll give a substantive response.

It is obviously true that in the moment of crisis, leaders face tremendous pressure to do something dramatic to address the crisis, and often those decisions turn out, in retrospect, to be wrong.

In the case of the covid crisis, the problems were confounded by a determined unwillingness of scientific and public health leaders to respond to data -- in real time -- that showed that core assumptions underlying the lockdown strategy were wrong.

Here is a short list of facts about covid that undermined these leaders' core assumptions:
* covid is airborne,
* covid spreads asymptomatically,
* covid infection fatality rate << case fatality rate,
* covid has a sharp age gradient in its infection mortality risk,
* lockdowns cannot suppress covid spread or protect the vulnerable for long,
* lockdowns crush the lives and well-being of children, the poor, and the working class, and almost everyone other than the laptop class
* lockdowns cause a form of psychological terror that guarantee they could never last just two weeks

The WHO and public health leaders got all of these facts wrong in 2020, which I suppose is understandable.

What is not understandable is that these same leaders conducted "devastating takedowns" of even well-credentialed outside critics who pointed out that the WHO's core assumptions were incorrect, and accepted these assumptions as true even as overwhelming data to the contrary emerged in real time.

What is not understandable is the utter confidence that the WHO and public health leaders expressed in these ideas and lockdown policies to the public as the only way to protect the population, going so far as to call for censorship of contrary voices on social media and elsewhere.

The closest analogue I can think of is the set of "best and brightest" advisors who told Pres. LBJ that victory in the Vietnam War was just around the corner, based on a whole host of faulty information.

Leaders who come out of such situations having embraced such a litany of catastrophically failed ideas and policies have a few choices on how to handle the post-crisis era.

1) They can, in good faith, admit their failures and work to reform systems so the disaster never happens again. This would be best, though I would understand why the public would want a new set of leaders to design and implement the reforms. I personally am very happy to work with and learn from public health leaders who choose this option.

2) They can pretend to have done nothing wrong, clinging to power for as long as they can, hoping against hope that history will vindicate them, crushing public trust in the institutions they lead.

3) They can try to pretend they never recommended or adopted the catastrophically failed policies, hoping that the public has a short memory. This is the current strategy that the @WHO is taking.

4) They can appeal to the difficulty of the job of handling a crisis under considerable uncertainty, not in a spirit of reform, but rather as an excuse to avoid responsibility for their failed crisis management. This is the approach that Koopmans is taking in her thread.

I have very little sympathy for the covid crisis leaders who choose options 2, 3, or 4. Their job was to manage the uncertainty with wisdom and humanity, which they failed to do. They cannot, at this juncture, turn around and expect public sympathy because their job was hard, or expect the public to forget their failure. These leaders have destroyed public trust in public health, and should step aside as a new set of public health leaders works to fix the damage they caused.

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

🚨 NEW: Fmr. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield Now Says the COVID Jab Should Not Have Been Called a Vaccine

“It was never meant to prevent transmission … It probably was a misnomer to call it a vaccine. It's really more like a medicine. It doesn't stop infection.”

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@SecKennedy on the new Food Pyramid: "Today, 50% of the calories our children eat are ultra-processed food... We now have a science-based Food Pyramid based upon the most recent, best science, and it's telling people to eat proteins, eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, and whole grains—and that is going to transform the American dietary culture."

[Daniel Foubert @d_foubert]

Europe doesn't have "a problem". It has THREE problems: 3 European nations are suffering from a severe "post-imperial hangover".

First, there is the United Kingdom, a nation that voted for Brexit to "take back control" only to realize it has completely forgotten how to drive.

The British identity crisis is like watching a retired lion try to adopt a vegan diet. They traded imperial confidence for an HR department’s sensitivity training. The land of Churchill is now governed by a sprawling "nanny state" bureaucracy that is more terrified of offending someone on X than it is of actual decline. The British police, once the envy of the world, now seem to spend more resources investigating "non-crime hate incidents" and painting their patrol cars in rainbow colors than solving burglaries. It is a nation desperately clinging to the aesthetics of tradition—the Royals, the pomp, the tea—while its institutions have been hollowed out by a progressive rot that makes a California university campus look conservative. They want the swagger of the 19th century but are paralyzed by the emotional fragility of the 21st.

Then there is France, the angry, chain-smoking aunt of Europe who refuses to admit she’s been unemployed for decades.

France’s hangover manifests as a permanent state of insurrection masquerading as "civic engagement." Their identity is split between a delusional elite who still think Paris is the capital of the universe and a populace that expresses its "joie de vivre" by burning down bus stops every Thursday. The French suffer from a Napoleonic complex without a Napoleon; they demand the living standards of a conquering empire while working a 35-hour week and retiring at an age when most Americans are just hitting their stride. They preach "Republican values" and aggressive secularism, yet the state has lost control over vast swathes of its own suburbs. France is essentially a beautiful, open-air museum where the curators are on strike, the guards are afraid of the visitors, and the management is busy lecturing the rest of the world on "grandeur" while the electricity bill goes unpaid.

Finally, we have Germany, the neurotic giant that has decided the only way to atone for its history is to commit slow-motion industrial suicide.

Germany’s post-imperial hangover is a moral autoimmune disease: the country is so terrified of its own shadow that it has replaced national pride with aggressive self-flagellation and recycling regulations. Their identity is built on being the "Moral Superpower," which practically translates to shutting down their perfectly functional nuclear power plants to burn dirty coal, all while lecturing their neighbors on carbon footprints. It is a nation of engineers who have engineered a society that doesn't work. The German spirit, once defined by efficiency and discipline, has mutated into a paralyzed bureaucracy where filling out the correct form is more important than the outcome. They are so desperate to avoid being "threatening" that they’ve become essentially a large NGO with an army that has broomsticks for rifles, terrified that showing any backbone might be interpreted as a relapse.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Imagine if the US and EU were still aligned on the censorship-by-proxy strategy. Few people realize how close we were to global totalitarianism.